An introduction to the Google Books Partner Program

There are two components to the Google Books Partner Program:

The Preview Program is a free marketing program that enables publishers and authors to promote their books online, through Google Books. By submitting your book, you'll make it discoverable to Google users around the world.

When readers find your book on Google Books, they can preview a limited number of pages to help them confirm that it's what they're looking for. They'll also be shown a convenient set of links for purchasing the book at major online retailers. You can include a link to your own website as well.

Additionally, partners in some countries can sell digital editions of their books on Google Play, earning revenue whenever users purchase their eBooks from the Google Play store. Although Google Books and Google Play are different platforms, books must be made previewable on Google Books in order to be sold on Google Play. Learn more about the process of selling books.

How Google Books works

We scan the full text of your book, allowing each word to be a possible match for Google Books searches. This means that if someone searches for the word "rabbit" and "rabbit" appears on a page of your book, your book could be listed in the search results, even if the title doesn't contain the word. And making your book fully searchable doesn't mean that it's fully visible -- you control the percentage of your book's pages that users can browse.

We've also integrated the Google Books index with the index of Google Web Search, so our users around the world will be able to discover your books.

Your content is protected

We host all book content on our secure servers. We disable the print, cut, copy, and save functionality on all preview pages displaying book content, in order to protect your material.

Google also protects your content by limiting the number of pages that are shown to users. You can choose to make a percentage from 20% to 100% of your book's content browsable.

If you sell books on Google Play, you can choose to apply industry-standard DRM (Digital Rights Management) to your eBooks.

You retain your copyright. Google does not assume any copyright to your material.

Your benefits

Making your books available on Google Books helps potential readers discover them. People who like what they read in the preview may go on to purchase the entire book, netting you sales. We make this easy by displaying links to major book retailers, as well as to a site of your choice.

How to submit your book

You should have digital versions of your books available in either PDF or EPUB format. After you create a partner account, you'll be able to access the Partner Center, an online interface for uploading and managing your book settings. You can then follow the steps for adding your first book.

New publisher sign-ups in the Google Play Books Partner Center are temporarily closed.